In his sometimes enjoyable longest novel yet, the author’s obsession with sex and desire competes for attention with his usual grandstanding and an intricate, Dan Brown-like pulp mystery
, pungent satires that ruthlessly insisted on sex as just another commodity in a marketplace of winners and losers. , in which Houellebecq gets murdered – but it’s the incel-adjacent vibe of his best-known work that has decisively shaped his reputation. But only with his dismal 2019 novel,protests come to the boil, did time seem to be up for Houellebecq, whose work seemed almost crushed by the weight of its own instinct for provocation.
Civil servants Paul and Prudence have been in a sexless marriage for the past 10 years. They don’t have children, their mortgage is paid off, but they lead separate lives in the same Paris apartment, having previously quarrelled over her conversion to veganism. He works late into the night as right-hand man to the French finance minister, who has been targeted by hackers with a faked video of his beheading.
Houellebecq doesn’t normally write from multiple points of view and he finds himself saying “Meanwhile” or “At more or less the same time” a fair bit as he cuts between characters. But for all the book’s affinity with Dan Brown,peculiar vigour keeps you on your toes. Paul’s view that his sister is “a better-quality human being” prompts a footnote about the difficulty of establishing a metric.
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